I just saw an article posted on Facebook. Apparently social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are destroying the English language, children's literacy and contributing to the demise of modern society.
I love these, because the poor grammar moan - along with the poor manners moan - is the refuge of everyone who has very little left to live for. This complaint is eternally present, and tends to be directed at young people. It isn't even limited to the English language (read Dostoyevsky).
However, the point is THIS ARTICLE BY CTV NEWS is the latest announcing the destruction of the English language. Gutting. Now, the media pointing fingers at poor grammar is a bit like Stalin promoting human rights. If you would like, you can go through that article and find the errors. I'll point out a few of the best ones - one of the things I enjoy most about bad grammar is the unintentional-meaning errors (which have the delightfully euphemistic name dangling modifiers). I don't want to be pedantic about misplaces commas, it's far more fun to look for the funny errors.
To write this article, they even found a few profs to interview. For example, the brilliant Paul Budra ('English professor, and associate dean of arts and sciences at Simon Fraser [University]). About language usage he said, "punctuation errors are huge". When I read this, it conjured up a few fantastic images. First, I thought of a gigantic, godzilla-sized comma destroying buildings at Simon Fraser. One student in the background yelling, "RUN! It's commazilla!" (mouth movements not synched to the voice).
Really!? Are punctuation errors really HUGE!? Or are they common?
I know, in English speech is more informal than written English (and online writing tends to be even less formalized). But, the words black, pot, kettle and shut up spring to mind.
Here's another quote I like. It would be terrible to speak the obvious, but, "If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that's a problem." (This gem from Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University).
I don't want to be overly critical, but this condemnation of the degradation of language as a new phenomenon caused by Twitter and Facebook is ridiculous. There is absolutely no convincing proof in this article that links the two.
Illiteracy, or poor literacy is likely just more visible because of the accessibility of word processors. Now the extensive errors, and global shifts in language are more visible. But, access to information is also completely changed - how about we use this to draw attention and work on it (where it's needed).
Yeah, cheers, thanks alot.
My favourite part of this article is at the very bottom, where it suggests, "share this article with your social network", followed by Facebook, Twitter, etc. links.
